Deeds, Not Words Count On South Africa

October 8, 1985|By Anthony Lewis, New York Times

BOSTON — ''They should deal with the African National Congress.'' That was Secretary of State Shultz's urgent advice last week to the South African government. He said Pretoria should release Nelson Mandela from prison and start talking with him and his banned nationalist organization.

Sound advice, most specialists on South Africa would say, because the ANC has widespread support among the black majority. But there is a puzzling question about it: Why don't Shultz and his colleagues take the advice themselves?

Reagan administration officials will not meet leaders of the ANC. There have been casual encounters with American diplomats at receptions here and there, but U.S. policy excludes regular appointments and discussions.

South African business leaders went to Zambia last month to talk with officials of the ANC. But those officials are not invited to the U.S. Embassy in Lusaka. Oliver Tambo, the ANC president, came to the United States last spring and met business people and others. He was not invited to the State Department.

Urging South Africa to talk with the ANC while we do not do so ourselves is so curious that to make sure the policy remained in effect, I asked the State Department last week. A spokesman checked with an official of the African Bureau and then reported: ''You're right, we have never met the ANC.''

That anomaly is indicative of the more general trouble with the Reagan policy toward South Africa. While Shultz says that the apartheid system must go -- and means it -- the message does not get through to South Africans with clarity or force.

The recent history of American policy is one reason for its muffled impact in South Africa. For four years the Reagan administration acted on the assumptions that P.W. Botha's government was ready for accommodation on its borders and meaningful reform at home. The assumptions were fallacious. And acting on them, cozying up to the white regime, made the United States look like its supporter.

Events forced a change in the Reagan policy. Botha's brutal repression at home and military

aggression across the borders made it impossible to keep saying with a straight face that change was at hand. Congressional opposition was about to overwhelm the policy when President Reagan made his timely switch to modest sanctions against apartheid.

But American responses to the alarming reality of the South African crisis remain faint and timid. Botha insults the United States, and the whisper comes back. His police shoot children, and you have to strain to hear any comment from the president of the United States.

There could hardly be a more deliberate insult, between supposed diplomatic friends, than what the South African government has done lately on its borders. Its planes and troops have struck deep into Angola, and it has admitted supporting terrorist forces in Mozambique -- both in violation of the most serious undertakings to the United States.

To that Botha has recently added personal insults. Speaking to a party congress, he said: ''President Reagan, who has much to say in his mispronouncing way about apartheid, is shoving Indians into reservations . . . ''

Or think about the behavior of the police as they occupy black townships in South Africa. A study by Cape Town University found that 83 percent of detainees it questioned reported being tortured by such methods as electric shock, strangulation and beating.

Imagine how the Reagan administration would react if Nicaragua invaded one neighboring country and admitted supplying terrorists in another, if its police shot into crowds of people day after day, if it detained 3,000 of its own citizens without charges, including hundreds of children. The outrage would not be muffled.